I don't think Office XP will be a big success. After all, Office 2000 wasn't. In general, people will only use XP if it comes with their machine plus the product activation and subscription based upgrades will put many people off.

We're still using Office 97 at work with no intension of 'upgrading'. Anyone who wants to exchange documents with us must use Office 97 or 95 format and I expect many companies will enforce require this. There are so many '97 users out there, it'll remain the standard for quite a while to come.

Sean.

Paul Abrahams <abrahams@acm.org>
Sent by: pwa@chmls05.mediaone.net
05/31/2001 11:08 AM AST

To: SuSE listserve <suse-linux-e@suse.com>
cc:
bcc:
Subject: [SLE] [OT] MS Office (XP): the sad truth

The sad truth is that MS Office, and Word in particular, has
become a de facto standard in much of big business and
government, both in the USA and (it appears) in other
countries such as Great Britain.    Documents get exchanged
in that format, and if you don't have the latest version
(soon to be XP) you can't work with them.   The behavior is
self-reinforcing.

Star Office isn't a solution, and won't be until and unless
it is able to both import and export the most recent MS
formats.   I wish that would happen, but I don't expect it
to.

Please don't get me wrong.   I lament this state of affairs
as much as anyone here.    The only solution I can see is a
new antitrust action that would force Microsoft to publish
its data formats for all Office products 90 days before
releasing any new ones and would explicitly permit anyone
else to use them.

Paul



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